Dark Souls II – has the best game of a generation been saved until last? (review)

Video games no longer launch within a meritocracy – if indeed they ever did. The sheer volume of new titles released via Steam and smartphone app stores mean that many interesting, unusual or well-crafted projects fail to reach the audience that they perhaps deserve. Flash-in-the-pan success stories such as the Vietnamese-made Flappy Bird, the iOS phenomenon-du-jour, can seem capricious; these are unpredictable outliers from whose success few meaningful lessons can truly be drawn.

From Software’s Dark Souls series (which debuted with the Sony-funded Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 3) is an exception to the rule. Its success has been slow, steady and entirely fuelled by the joyous admiration and grassroots support of players around the world. Demon’s Soul was originally overlooked when it was revealed at the Tokyo Game Show in 2008. This dark fantasy-themed action game demands that players learn, understand and master its systems, or else face severe punishment. The precise nature of its combat is at odds with insta-thrills of popular button-mashing contemporaries while the dingy aesthetic and ephemeral storyline make the game ill-suited to a ten-minute burst of play on a noisy show floor. Some players even put the controller down before they made it past the character creation screen, the game’s creator Hidetaki Miyazaki has said.

As such, Sony launched Demon’s Souls in Japan with little fanfare. The game sold fewer than 30,000 copies in its first week. But then word of mouth spread and a tail of sales began to extend and rise. Another publisher picked Demon’s Souls up for a Western launch and, when this was met with profitable success, From Software began work on a sequel, Dark Souls, which would became one of the best-regarded video games of the past decade. Unlike Flappy Bird, Dark Souls’ success is easier to quantify, even if it boldly eschews current fashions in style and design.

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About as far from the churning mainstream of gung-ho action games as one can trek, in Dark Souls you skitter through narrow sewers and dense forests while cowering behind a shield. Your only hope is to come across one of the bonfires that punctuate this unforgiving world, a rare point of safety to which you will return if your character is killed in battle. It’s tense, taut and the sense of achievement when you overcome one of the game’s many and varied pitfalls is unusually potent. Dark Souls’ subsequent success was not founded on marketing spend, then, but on the grim, evangelical affection of its players.

It’s this same affection that landed the British actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz a key role in Dark Souls II, which launches next month. He was so enamoured with its predecessor that he approached Namco-Bandai with an offer to lend his voice to one of the forthcoming game’s characters. The publisher agreed and Serafinowicz has provided not only the voice of Pate, one of the game’s typically inscrutably and weird inhabitants, but also the grunts of exertion and screams of terror that make up the main player character’s vocal repertoire. Even the game’s contributing actors appear to have come for love, not money.

As well as the kindness of talented fans, Dark Souls II has clearly benefitted from the kind of additional investment that success affords. Its world, a shadowy island that seems to be in equal parts based on the crags and froth of the Cornish coastline and the granite-faced castles and conifers of Romania has been built upon an all new graphical engine. It renders the island’s nooks and contours with exquisite grace. The game’s opening section takes place within a deserted clearing where small mammals scuttle and cringe in the tall grass, and where you are lead toward your goal by an enticing use of lighting. Each scene has been composed with greater care than was seen in the earlier games; the sense of aesthetic wonder when you finally emerge from a network of stone corridors onto a yellow-grassed coastline is unforgettable.

This sequel’s style and rhythm is entirely in keeping with the previous titles in the series. This is a haunting and haunted netherworld of chinked cobblestones, crumbling clock towers and beleaguered knights. You meet other travellers slumped against walls or tree stumps, and they offer barely sensical encouragement or admonishment – all of which adds to the mystique. The world appears to be open for exploration: there are multiple routes that can be taken right from the start, each with its own awaiting snares and terrors. The series’ wonderfully esoteric and ambient multiplayer aspects remain: you can see ghost-like animations that reveal where other players died (perhaps offering a clue as to a hidden danger) while its possible to invade or be invaded by other players for co-operative or combative play at any moment.

The tweaks to gameplay are subtle. The game now allows for regional matching, so you can play alongside players from your nation should you prefer. There are now two ways to jump in the game both of which are more easily executed than in the past. Melee damage is determined by your distance to a target, increasing as you close in, a development that adds further subtlety and nuance to what is already the finest combat system in video games. Your character, chosen from a clutch of classes, can equip four status-affecting rings instead of two. This is a game without a pause button, but while you’re delving about in menu screens your character is now shown on screen, so it’s easier to notice if you’re being attacked while changing your equipment, for example. The inventory has been overhauled for simpler management, and a ‘Soul Vessel’ item allows you to reset your character’s parameters (where before you were forced to begin the game afresh with a new character).

New items allow you to alter the game’s difficulty. One, when burned at a bonfire, will increase enemies’ power in the vicinity. Another item increases the capacity of your Estus Flask, the item that replenishes your character’s health. There are improved ways to ward off other players who would invade your game and wreak havoc (including punitive measures for those who continually murder other players: it’s possible for these spoilsports to see their health capped as low as ten per cent of its capacity).

These small amends may have tremendous knock-on effects. But they are also minutiae in a game where the broad sweep experience is arguably more important than the nitty-gritty detail. Dark Souls found its audience through attention to detail, but more importantly, its ambiance, idiosyncratic character, mysterious, foggy storyline and, of course, those unforgettable set-piece battles. That all of these factors make a return for this sequel is one of the few mysteries that can be solved ahead of the game’s release.

• Dark Souls II is out on March 11 on Xbox 360 and PS3. A PC version is due later.